Is This When HBO’s ‘Westworld’ Actually Takes Place?

For as many questions as HBO’s Westworldproclaimed to answer by Season 1 finale “The Bicameral Mind,” we still haven’t the clearest picture of a world outside the park, whether in actual geography, or the current year. Now, another easter egg on the Delos website may clarify how far off the world of Westworld is, multiple timelines and all.

Take this with a grain of salt for the moment, as the vast majority of post-mortem interviews with creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan declined to confirm any extraneous details (we still don’t know if “SW” stands for “Samurai World,” to give you an idea). That said, a brief easter egg on the now-malfunctioning DelosIncorporated.com seems to assign a specific date to the park breakdown.

By visiting the buggy website and entering “reverie” into the admin box, you’ll be shown snippets of “corrupt footage” from Maeve’s escape with Hector, Armstice and Felix. Currently, a date in the top left corner has been changed to “XX/XX/XXXX” (HBO apparently got wise to the attention), but originally read “6/15/2052.”

You’re probably not alone to observe that said date seems surprisingly nearby, given the revelation that Dolores and Arnold’s original disaster at the park took place 35 years earlier, in 2018. That may, in fact, be why HBO replaced the original dated video in the first place, but Jonathan Nolan also told Entertainment Weekly that the series intends to reveal more details of the outside world as the Hosts themselves discover them:

We don’t want to create the world’s largest mystery around it because we have equally interesting, or more interesting, character questions to ask. But I think the rule we’ve built from the beginning — whether it’s frustrating for the audience or not; hopefully it’s not — is you really only know as much as the host’s know. Our worldview is limited to theirs. They don’t know where they are yet. We tried teasing that in the finale, but it doesn’t seem fair that the audience would know if they don’t.

It could be some time yet before we learn for sure, especially as Westworld Season 2 won’t arrive until our 2018, but is 2052 a plausible year for the series’ present?